


Hominem Te Esse Memento

by squeakymonster



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen, Mentions of Cancer, Trans Female Character, Trans Girl Mako, death mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-23
Updated: 2014-05-23
Packaged: 2018-01-26 04:46:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1675223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squeakymonster/pseuds/squeakymonster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mako goes back to her parent’s house for the first time when she’s eighteen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hominem Te Esse Memento

Mako goes back to her parent’s house for the first time when she’s eighteen. She hasn’t seen Tanegashima since she was twelve. She’s been living in Shatterdomes all over for six years, Tokyo to Alaska to Lima, and the skyline she sees as the train rolls in is at once achingly familiar and entirely alien.

Or maybe it’s just the ways that she’s changed that makes everything feel so different.

She’s been on hormones for two and a half years by then. For the first time in years, the face reflected in the mirror looks like a self she recognizes, and it makes her smile at herself in the window over the top of her book. She wonders what her parents would think of her if they saw her now. She likes to imagine they would be proud.

 

_When Mako is four years old, her father decides it is time to for her to learn the family trade. Her mother protests. “He is too young,” Mako remembers her saying in a low voice. She is sitting in the dining room, momentarily distracted from her bowl of kimi balls by the tight anxiety in her mother’s voice carrying louder than she intended from the kitchen. “He will be injured. Little children should not be around such fires before they have learned to keep their hands out of them.”_

_“Nonsense. I started at Makoto’s age, and I am just fine.”_

_“It was a different time.”_

_“A time with less coddling. A good thing, perhaps.”_

_“Masao!” It is one of the few times Mako remembers her mother raising her voice. “You are being unreasonable. You do not let Makoto touch your finished swords except in the scabbard. Why would you prefer he do it when they are white-hot?”_

_“Hush, he will hear you! I am not changing my mind. He is the only son left to the Moris. There is a great legacy behind him.”_

_After that, the conversation fell to a whisper that Mako could not decipher. She focused instead on her dessert and the pigeons she could see on her neighbor’s roof, flocking close and then flying apart, again and again._

Mako could have gone back earlier. The family never got around to selling the house or the forge, so she’d have a place to stay. Her grandmother called her frequently and entreated her to come home, told her there will always be a place for her, but Mako doesn’t, not even when her grandmother calls on her sixteenth birthday and says Mako is “the smartest and sweetest of my granddaughters.” She appreciates the effort, but she’s not sure she can.

 

 _By the time she is seven, Mako knows all about how to pump the billows, how and when to pour water onto the sword so that it cools just right. But what she likes most of all are the days when she can watch her father work for hours, pounding and shaping the_ tamahagane _into smoothness_ _again and again, hammering in time to her heartbeat. Mako has learned the sacredness of this long ago._ Shita-kitae _was her third word. On those days, her father tells her stories of her ancestors’ accomplishments, the long dynasty of sword makers that Mako is a part of._

_“Have I told you the story of Mori Haruki, from the twelfth century, who forged a sword for the founder of the Kamakura shogunate, Minamoto Yoritomo?” He’d say, sweat pouring down his face. “Our swords have shaped Japanese history, little one.”_

_This is one of his favorite stories; he describes the Battle of Dan-no-ura as though he was there himself. Mako doubts the truthfulness of his account, just a little bit, but she just says, “No, Father, you haven’t.”_

_“Ah! Your education is remiss, Makoto! It’s a terrible tragedy. Let me correct it a little bit. We begin on March 23 rd, 1185…”_

The train pulls into the Tanegashima stop with a long wheeze. Mako gathers her belongings into her beloved PPDC knapsack, buttons her coat up to her chin, and sets out.

Tanegashima is not a big town, and the Mori house is not far from the train station. Mako waves aside the fleet of taxis and sets out walking. It’s a cool day, drizzling. Mako loved this sort of day when she was little. It made her feel like anything was possible.

But she is not little anymore, and moreover she forgot her umbrella. By the time she is halfway to the house, there is a steady series of drops plinking from the ends of her bob. Shaking her head like a dog, Mako walks into a little noodle shop and sits down at the counter, ordering a bowl of soup. The place is quiet, almost empty. She wonders if she will run into anyone she used to know today, anyone she remembers from school. Six years isn’t that long, but it feels like a lifetime. Like more than a lifetime.

 

_The first person Mako told about being a girl is her best friend in fifth grade, a sweet plump girl named Murasaki. They share everything, first initials and lunches and secrets all mixed together._

_Mako, age nine, is short for her age, slim and awkward. She likes order and stories with dragons in them and the sweet strawberry smell of Murasaki’s brand new Hello Kitty lip gloss._

_The secret, the only one Mako’s ever been able to keep, comes tumbling out of her mouth on lazy Saturday afternoon. She and Murasaki are in the park near Murasaki’s house, away from her mother’s watchful eyes. It’s beautiful out, crystal clear and sunny._

_They start talking about people in their class, and Murasaki says she has a crush on Jun. Mako purses her lips when she hears that. “I don’t know, he’s a bit too—disrespectful. He’s always clowning around in class and being very silly. He’s not going to get very good marks, is he?”_

_“Sshh, silly boy, you don’t understand. Jun is handsome, and funny, that’s what matters.”_

_“He is very pretty. I don’t think he’s my type, though,” Mako chooses her words carefully, aping the mannerism of the teenage girls she sees on TV._

_“Well, no! He’s a boy!”_

_“Um.”_

_Murasaki’s face shifts. She looks surprised, but she smiles. “Makoto, do you like boys?”_

_“Well, yes, but I’m not—“_

_“It’s okay to be gay, Makoto.”_

_“No, see, I’m not gay! I’m a girl.”_

Mako reaches her parents’ house maybe forty minutes later, belly pleasantly full. There is an electricity in her fingertips as she slides the key into the lock and pushes the door open. It creaks loudly as she enters. The noise bothers her more than it should. She remembers her mother oiling the hinges once a week, sending Mako running all over the house to discover new creaks for her to fix.

The house is musty, but there is a familiar scent underneath the mothballs and dust. Mako breathes in deeply. She blinks open her eyes, not remembering having closed them. The rush of memory is powerful, almost overwhelming.

She moves through the house more slowly now, as if walking in molasses, or the sea.

 

_She is ten years old. Her hair has been growing out for years and is usually tied back in a low ponytail. It is her pride and joy. There is a slick of lip gloss tangy on her mouth and the sting of bile ugly in the back of her throat. Her mother tugs her by the wrist into the kitchen, sits her down. Her aunt is over, and she stares at Mako’s made up face, at the way her hair has been curled._

_“What has Makoto gotten into?”_

_Mako’s mother does not answer immediately. She takes a deep breath. “Just a moment, Rin.” It is plain to see that she wants Rin to leave, but she is too polite to say anything. “Makoto, we’re going to talk. You’re going to tell me how you feel, what is making you dress like this.”_

_Mako shrugs, knowing it’s intensely rude. She sort of half bows to make up for it and mumbles, “There’s nothing_ wrong _…just, um. I like it.”_

_“Why? You’re a boy, you should like boy things. You want to be like your father, don’t you? You always follow him around like a puppy dog.”_

_Mako glances at Rin, who has not budged. Looking out the window at the flocks of pigeons, she sits up straighter and says, “Yes, I want to be like my father, but…I don’t think I am a boy.”_

Mako blinks and she is standing in the kitchen, looking out that same window. There are tears in her eyes and she doesn’t know how she got there. Her mother’s face floats up in here mind, and she cannot rid herself of the ache of it, the guilt and the frustration and the longing. She turns to the sink, splashes water on her face, counts her breaths until they are slow and even, and then continues walking, doing the same for her steps.

She heads to her basement next. It’s warm and shallow and moist, her pale blue childhood wallpaper crumbling. There’s probably mold growing somewhere, but Mako isn’t deterred. She runs her hands over the walls, lets them float upward. She can just barely touch the ceiling. This was her playroom. When the first kaiju had attacked San Francisco, her family had huddled here, listening to the radio reports and unsure what was going on.

Mako swallows. She cannot afford to think about the kaiju today. She walks back upstairs, instead.

Her bedroom, first. Parents’ after.

 

_The summer Mako turns eleven, her parents let her redecorate her bedroom. The gender therapist, the transgender support group, all of it had been done quietly and without fuss, almost as soon as she first told them. The clothes, and the name, and the pronouns—those had all taken a little bit longer. Mako had simply dropped the last syllable of her first name to feminize it. Mako, she knows, means “child of truth.” It is nice to finally start being truthful about this._

_Her hair is cut girlishly, and though she mostly wears trousers and t-shirts, her mother has started letting her sometimes pick out shirts made for girls, or wearing a swipe of strawberry lip gloss to school. Her teachers all know that she is a girl now, and her classmates adjusted almost instantly. Mako makes more sense to them as a girl than as an awkward, effeminate boy._

_She chooses to paint her room a pastel purple, with white furniture and a fuzzy deep blue bedspread. She has to spend the night on the couch for the weeks that it takes to finish her room, but it is worth it when she opens the door for the first time and sees the room, with her new clothes in the closet and her smiling face reflected in the vanity mirror on top of the dresser. Her father comes in to hug her and bring her to the forge with a lesson planned and a story already on his tongue, and as Mako follows him, she thinks that she will never be happier than she is in this moment._

The bedroom is still purple, as if that’s any consolation. The furniture is gone, mostly, except for the empty bed frame and the vanity mirror, now sitting on the floor facing the wall. Mako turns it around and glances in it, searching for something in her own face. There’s nothing there. She replaces the mirror, and walks down the hall to her parents’ room.

The door sticks in its frame when she tries to slide it open, and when she manages to get it open, the smell is stronger than anywhere else in the house, like it’s been concentrated in its long confinement. It’s the combination of her dad’s meds and the sour smell of vomit no amount of cleaning could get rid of and something else, under that, something dark and ugly and dying.

 

_On her twelfth birthday, Mako sits in the kitchen with her friends. They had all been laughing and cutting cake a moment before, before her dad lurched to the bathroom to vomit. The first round of chemo has been particularly hard on his body, and he looks years older, bald and wan and perpetually exhausted. He hasn’t been in the forge in months._

_Mako’s mother tries to tell a joke, get the conversation flowing again, but it falls on dead air. Mako is at the head of the table, and, shaking, she listens to her dad retch. No one, looking at her, can say a word. She wishes she had never been born because_ anything _would be easier than this._

She was wrong about that, of course _. But you know what they say about hindsight,_ she thinks. Digging around in her bag, she finds a couple sticks of incense, which she puts in her mother’s least favorite vase (the only one left in the kitchen) and, lighting them, sets on the stained carpet in the center of the room.

The smell is strong and clear and just a little bit spicy. The right thing to clear away any lingering memories. She lets them burn themselves out before leaving, closing the door very firmly behind her. There is nothing here she needs.

But she still hasn’t visited everywhere.

Her father’s forge is behind the house. From the outside, it is barely more than a wide shed, a small unimposing stone hut with a corrugated tin roof.

The double doors are wide and made of copper, rusted green and light enough to be easily propped open on the hot summer days that turn the inside of the forge into an oven.

 

 _Mako is almost thirteen when she makes her first and last sword. It’s small, rough-surfaced, and too brittle to really work, but she does it all by herself over two weeks in the late spring, when everything is in bloom and her father is staying at the hospital for round three of chemo and surgery consultations. Her auntie Rin is supposed to be watching her, but she is getting married soon and is intensely preoccupied with the preparations. Mako spends most of her time in the forge. She keeps the doors wide open, though the fires are unlit and it’s cool within the thick stone walls. She has a stack of books on a stool near the door and spends most of the summer reading there and at the library, entering the house only to sleep and at mealtimes. She is almost finished with the current volume of_ Kuroshitsuji _when the delivery man comes by with a delivery of iron sand that her father must have ordered a couple months ago and forgotten to cancel._

 _It’s been a while, but making_ tamahagane _is still instinctual to her. Most sword makers get their_ tamahagane _from a smelter, instead of making it themselves, but Mako’s father liked to know that he was always getting the best of every batch._

 _Heat the_ tatara _slowly until its heat washes over her in waves, making her a little lightheaded. She checks the temperature several times, knowing that she cannot afford to waste iron sand._

_Pour the iron sand into its vessel carefully, the heaviness of its cloth bag almost too much for her narrow shoulders. Watch it like a hawk, make sure it heats evenly, stir when you need to. It should be as smooth as you can get it. And then let the coal touch it, the carbon ripple across its surface. Mako works the bellows herself, shoulders aching and sweat rolling down her spine. Choose when to cool it carefully. Do not take your eyes off of it. Let it cool slowly. It will be stronger that way._

_The steel, when she lifts it gently from the_ tatara _piece by piece, is mostly a dull gray, with silver flecks and ribbons of bright coppery color. It is beautiful. She sets it on a table to cool, arranging the pieces like a jigsaw puzzle._

 _When she has finished making the_ tamahagane _, it is nearly one thirty in the morning. She has spent the whole day in the forge, since ten thirty that morning. She is famished and filthy and exhausted._

_She shakes her head to clear her mind, and stumbles back up the garden path to her house, and into bed. She is happier than she’s been in months._

 

The doors are green with rust. More than she remembers, anyway. She pulls open the doors, and the sight of the crumbling _tatara_ brings tears to her eyes. She thinks, _No._ Just that, and closes the door.

She will save that for her next visit, lets herself imagine the expanse of her future as she walks away. She knows that she has one now.

Mako locks the gate behind her.


End file.
